The Lesbos Court of Appeal canceled the judgment which, in 2020, had heavily condemned Mohammad Hanad Abdi for having driven a canoe of migrants between Turkey and Greece
By Marina Rafenberg (Athens, Correspondence)
At the exit of the Court of Appeal of the Greek island of Lesbos, in Greece, the aid to the criminalized migrants, a 29 -year -old Somali refugee, still carries handcuffs … but not for long. Within a month, the exile which had been sentenced in 2021, at first instance, to 142 years in prison for having driven an overloaded canoe of 33 migrants, two of whom died during the crossing between Izmir in Turkey and Lesbos in Greece , will be released.
After almost six hours of trial, the judge has considerably reduced the accused’s sentence due to a re -evaluation of the circumstances. Thanks to his “good behavior” in detention, his “more than 400 days of general work carried out”, and because he has already served two and a half years in prison, “he will be released within a month,” said One of his lawyers Alexandros Georgoulis. “We are very happy that he is soon released, but let’s not forget that this innocent person will have a criminal record for his whole life who also risks weighing in his next asylum procedures”, delayed after the verdict his other Avocado, Dimitris Choulis.
During his audience, a relative of Mohammad Hanad Abdi recalls that the latter fled Somalia, a country undermined by the civil war, where “corruption and violence are part of the daily life”. Chased by the terrorist group al-Chabab, and even targeted by shots while driving a truck, the young father of three first took a flight to Turkey. Then, not feeling safe in Turkey, he decides the 1 er December 2020 to pay a 450 dollars passer to join Greece.
a completely obsolete law
The boat he takes is overloaded with 33 other passengers who do not wear life vests. After 20 minutes, the engine stops, the water begins to infiltrate. Before abandoning them, the smuggler points to a pistol on Mohammad by ordering him in Turkish to take the bar. “I tried to help women, children, men who were on this boat, we all risk drowning. If it was to do again, I would act again the same,” says Mohammad Hanad Adbi, who Also admits not sleeping and having lost 15 kg during his detention in the prison on the island of Chios, neighboring Lesbos.
The case of this Somali had drawn the attention of the media and certain MEPs to the criminalization that asylum seekers who are trying to join the Greek islands from Turkey facing. In the Greek law (4,251- article 30), dating from 2014, any migrant accused of having led a snowboard of refugees faces a minimum sentence of ten years in prison, even if it is proven that it is not a passer and that he was not paid by the other passengers to cross. This law also provides fifteen years’ imprisonment for any person who died during the trip and eight years for each passenger transported, hence the huge sentence received by Mohammad at first instance.
“This law is completely obsolete, we now know that smugglers no longer approach the Greek coasts so as not to be arrested and let the migrants guide the boats by themselves”, notes Alexandros Georgoulis. However, in 2019 alone, 1,905 people were detained in Greece for this reason.
botched trials
According to the Greek left MEP (Syriza), Stelios Kouloglou, who launched an information campaign on the subject and enjoins his colleagues in the European Parliament to write to the Greek government to change this law, “thousands Other migrants are currently in the Greek prisons accused of being smugglers and wrongly sentenced. ” They are often condemned after unloved trials of only a few minutes and carried out in the absence of translators. “This is the second category of most important detainees in Greece”, according to the politician who also mobilized several Greek artists on this issue.
In December 2022, in Lesbos, two Afghans, Akif Razouli and Amir Zahiri, who had been sentenced to fifty years in prison, were also released on appeal in a similar case. “This gives us hope, notes Alexandros Georgoulis. We create precedents for future cases and we hope that gradually the criminalization of refugees in Greece will back up.”